Access scientific research online, free of charge, and free of licensing restrictions.
1. Consider Boolean searching--combining your terms with AND, OR, NOT.
2. Consider truncating. Most databases allow for finding variations of terms by using the symbol *. This ensures that variations of terms will appear--teen* will result in teen, teens, teenage, teenager, etc.
3. Use search limits on the left-hand side of your results page to narrow results by year, author, subject area, document type, and other criteria.
4. Use the FIND FULL TEXT feature in the database to see if an article is available online or in the library.
5. Try sorting search results by relevance rather than date to retrieve the articles that matched your search terms first.
You can find the sort by option on the upper right-hand side of your results page.
6. If you find an article that you like, use the Citations feature in Scopus to find articles that have cited that particular article. The last column of the search results page shows the number of citing articles. Simply click the linked number to go to those citing articles.
7. Review your results list and modify your search, if necessary, using terms you find in your results.
